Former U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman (left) and attorney Sean Buckley walk into the federal courthouse Monday for the start of federal corruption trial against Stockman.

Photo: Godofredo A. Vasquez /Houston Chronicle

HOUSTON — Former U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman became angry and began yelling when an old friend and campaign accountant confronted him about “red flags” raised by campaign contributions, according to testimony in a federal courtroom here Tuesday.

Rabih Zeidan, an assistant professor of accounting at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, testified that he was serving as Stockman’s campaign accountant when he sent the March 23, 2013, email flagging three maximum contributions apiece from two of Stockman’s aides as “red flags.”

“He was mad that I was raising that issue,” Zeidan told jurors told in the first day of Stockman’s federal fraud trial. “He was yelling.”

The email, and the actions it triggered, were the origin of the federal corruption case that has the former Republican lawmaker on trial, according to testimony during the first day of testimony.

A prosecutor questioned Zeidan at length about steps he took in the subsequent months in what the government contends was a cover-up by Stockman to account for money he spent on personal expenses and campaign debt.

Zeidan said he substituted the names of the aides’ parents as donors. When a news report uncovered the conflict, he blotted out the parents’ names and filed a report that they were listed as a mistake. And finally he notified federal election officials that the donations had been refunded.

The prosecution laid out a wide-ranging fraud case against Stockman, saying he stole charitable donations and funneled them through a series of bank accounts and then lied to cover his tracks.

“This case is the story of how the defendant over the course of four years exploited the trust and charity of others to pull off a massive scam,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Heberle, of the Justice Department’s public integrity division, told the jury during an opening statement.

“It is the story of a man who thinks that the rules are for other people,” Heberle said. “And it is the story of how, dollar by dollar, investigators followed the money and unraveled the defendant’s fraud scheme.”

Heberle said Stockman pulled off the scheme by cheating federal election law, lying to donors and blaming mistakes on his staff.

Heberle outlined several major donations Stockman, a trained accountant, solicited on behalf of charitable groups he was involved in and said the evidence would show that, with the help of two aides, Stockman quickly moved that money from one account to another and spent it to cover personal and campaign expenses.

Defense attorney Sean Buckley, however, had a drastically different take on the same series of financial transactions.

“The core question is whether Mr. Stockman lied with the intent to steal money” from two major donors, Buckley said. He said the 61-year-old Clear Lake man is innocent.

Buckley described his client as a scrappy, naive and idealistic outsider who lost track of his finances.

No matter how slick the government’s case is, he told jurors, they should keep in mind that the notion that he would move money around to enrich himself and his political campaigns doesn’t jibe with how Stockman has lived his life.

Stockman was homeless and living in city park in Fort Worth in the 1990s, Buckley said. He lives in a modest home, drives “an old, beat-up van” and eats at McDonald’s and Taco Bell. He ran his congressional campaign out of a “rundown dirty motorcycle repair shop,” according to his lawyer.

“This is not a case about fur coats, Rolexes and Mercedes Benzes,” Buckley said.

The federal case only outlined his client’s inability to follow through, he said.

“Stephen Stockman is a bright man, in some sense he may be a political visionary, but he is absent-minded … and he doesn’t always follow through on some of the important projects he starts,” Buckley said.

After opening statements, Leanna Saler, an FBI special agent specializing in public corruption cases, took the stand.

She said the investigation of Stockman was prompted by concerns about donations on the Stockman campaign’s federal election filings and spanned out to possible sources for the influx of money.

Her testimony followed the path of a $350,000 charitable donation by a major donor to a nonprofit group Stockman headed called Life Without Limits.

Saler said Stockman deposited the check in a nearly empty account and began transferring the money to two aides, who in turn wrote checks on it to Stockman’s campaign.

Saler testified federal election forms did not reflect donations had been made by the aides’ parents to Stockman’s campaign even though they were noted as having donated $7,500 apiece.

Next to testify was Zeidan, the accounting professor who had known Stockman since the 1980s, who volunteered to handle his federal election reports during his bid for Congress.

Stockman was housing some of his ragtag volunteers at a makeshift campaign office under Interstate 45 that once served as a motorcycle repair shop. And Zeidan was tackling the election reports.

Zeidan informed Stockman that donations from Stockman aides Jason Posey and Thomas Dodd didn’t look good, according to testimony. He asked whether it was possible — given their apparent low-income status — that the money had come from the men’s parents.

Posey and Dodd have both pleaded guilty and are likely to testify.

Zeidan filed the amended report with the Federal Election Commission. But when news broke the following October about the revised filing, Zeidan said he got Stockman’s blessing to submit an explanation to the commission of how the parents’ names had been added in error.

“You were going to tell the FEC it was a big mistake?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Melissa Annis asked.